Wi-Fi on a plane is great, but most people spend more time every day going back and forth to work on trains or ferries.
Wireless on trains has gone through ups and downs in the U.S. In fact, many promising projects, most in California, have died off. The reason: It's hard to find a good way to provide effective backhaul-the connection back to the Internet-on a vehicle moving that rapidly and from place to place. At least on a highway, with a 3G card, you're usually near the cellular towers with the equipment, but that's not always true when you're riding the rails.

One recently announced solution involves using Sprint's EV-DO network as backhaul for a Wi-Fi access point on the MBTA commuter line from Worcester to Framingham in Massachusetts. The free trial launched on one train in January and could eventually expand to all 13 commuter lines in the state.

There's still a chance that access could come to the California Capitol Corridor train, which travels between San Jose and Sacramento. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) may be signing a contract with a company called WiFi Rail as early as this month to provide on-train Wi-Fi to thousands of Bay Area commuters. WiFi Rail has already successfully tested its service, which uses something called "leaky coax" to get backhaul. The service involves a coaxial cable along the rails that works like an antenna, even if the train is traveling at 65 miles per hour. So there's hope for train-Fi yet, in California and beyond.

Of course, train stations are another matter: Finding a signal when you're waiting for your train to show up is a little easier. T-Mobile offers hot-spot service at Amtrak stations along the Eastern Seaboard. Up north, VIA Rail, Canada's national passenger rail service, has Wi-Fi at its stations for cross-country travelers moving between Toronto and Vancouver. Anyone taking the three-day cross-country trip can get online at least once a day. VIA's Windsor to Quebec City corridor also has Wi-Fi at stations, and on some of the cars.

Ferries have many of the same problems with backhaul that trains have (and it would be nice to think those problems could be solved with the same technology now going into airplanes). The Washington State Ferries in the Seattle area-which account for 50 percent of all the ferry trips in the U.S. based on the sheer number of passengers-have been trying Wi-Fi on boats for a while now. Most of the ferry service's water routes went online last year. It costs from $3.95 for 2 hours up to $29.95 a month for unlimited use. Because the Wi-Fi provider, Parsons, has a roaming agreement with Boingo and iPass, subscribers of either aggregator can get access to the network during their commute and to hundreds of other hot spots in the city (all those Starbucks!), all for the same subscription price. And the MBTA in Boston recently announced comprehensive Wi-Fi access on all 11 ferries in the harbor. Last year, the service ferried around nearly 1.5 million riders.

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